Topic 1: Reading books to change your fate
Reading books to change your fate, this is a phrase that people often hear, and has become one of the most important reasons to motivate people to read. How does the speaker understand this saying?
Born in the Arab world, a place where the status of women is low, girls have to overcome a lot of difficulties to get an education. After overcoming all these difficulties, the speaker became a photographer who wanted to document in photos women who had been transformed through education.
Many women were reluctant at first, but through the speaker's repeated explanations of the program's impact on other women, some agreed to be photographed. Through this program, the speaker sees how education can make women more independent, more in control of their lives, and more able to gain a sense of freedom.
Reading changes your life, and in this day and age when this statement is being questioned, I think reading doesn't necessarily bring you monetary rewards, but it does make you more independent in your mind and richer in your heart.
Topic 2: How to make friends with stress
Making friends with stress is something that many people think is impossible. Stress is seen by many as something to be avoided because of the damage it can do to the body and mind in our minds. Why does the speaker think stress is a friend?
The speaker started to think that stress was bad, but then the speaker learned about a study that showed that people who were highly stressed but did not see stress as an enemy were healthier.
The speaker began to change her mind about stress, shifting her perception to see the increased heart rate and sweating associated with stress as the body's active preparation for a challenge, as well as the production of oxytocin during stress, which causes people to seek out support and build strong, intimate relationships, all of which are good for health.
Correct perception is important. Treat stress as a friend, not an object to be squashed, and you'll be healthier.
Topic 3: The Path to Self-Worth
The speaker got right to the point: people don't pay for your true worth, they pay for what they think you're worth, and you can control their perception. This is a very clear point of view, and it immediately sparked my interest in continuing to read on.
We need to communicate our value to others, whether we're looking for a job or communicating with a client, and we need to clearly articulate what value I can create for the organization and the client. The speaker argued that to get a salary that matches your value, you need to be able to define your value as well as communicate it.
Studies have shown that women get paid less at work, compared to men, and that women need to learn how to get a salary that matches their value more than men.
The speaker suggests that you can do this by thinking about the following questions:
1. What do my clients need and how can I fulfill their needs?
2. What are the special qualities in me that allow me to serve my clients better?
3. What do I have that others can't?
4. What value can I create for my clients?
Many people undervalue themselves because of self-doubt. By helping one woman feel more confident in expressing herself and focusing her expression on what value she can create for her clients, the speaker was able to stop her fear of meeting with difficult clients.
This presentation really reflects the fact that your value comes from other people's perceptions, and you can control other people's perceptions.
It's also important to focus on what value you can create for others in how you communicate your value. This allows you to express your value objectively without giving people a sense of bragging about yourself, and you're more likely to get recognition for your value.
Topic 4: Living Toward Death
Death is something that everyone has to experience. Talking about it can be a very heavy topic. More knowledge about death can make people live better.
The speaker had a face-to-face experience with death, and naturally, he had a deeper experience of death than the average person. Through his own experience, he realized that medical institutions are designed to treat illnesses rather than to care for the people themselves. He began to think about how we should return to caring for people.
The process of dying itself involves a great deal of suffering, and we should first minimize the pain that is unnecessary. For example, loss and regret cause pain. Loss may be unavoidable, but regret can be avoided, we should not give their own life regret. This requires us to know what is important to us.
Live in the moment. Life is in the present, only if you live in the present, you will be able to experience the connection with the outside through your own senses, and at this time, you will feel that you are really living.
Make life more colorful. Human needs can be categorized into physical and spiritual needs, and from both, we can enrich our lives.
The speaker is talking about how to design health care from the perspective of death so that people who are about to die can leave with dignity. From this presentation, we can learn how to live. Without knowing death, how can we know how to live. Only with the knowledge of death, we can live better.
Topic 5: The World's Last Pure Land
How did Bhutan, a country of 700,000 people with a GDP of 2 billion dollars, manage to achieve negative carbon emissions?
First of all, the country has made basic education and healthcare free, which greatly reduces the burden on a family, and the damage to the natural environment caused by the stress of education and healthcare.
In addition, the government has done the following: it has provided free and clean electricity to the people; it has made efforts to make government offices paperless; and it has encouraged the use of clean transportation. All of these measures have lowered carbon emissions.
In addition, Bhutan's constitution states that the country should have no less than 60% green cover, while in reality it has 72% forest cover.
Now that environmental issues have been brought to the forefront of the minds of all nations, if in the past people were skeptical about global warming, today they agree that the world is warming and they are seeing the damage it is doing.
Global warming is a problem that needs to be tackled by all countries. It is not like other problems, such as localized wars, which are territorial. No country is immune to global warming. As the speaker said, though Bhutan has made great efforts on carbon emission, it has to bear the brunt of natural disasters like floods, mudslides etc. due to warming.
Bhutan is a small country with a low GDP, but this does not excuse it from taking responsibility for environmental protection, which is very commendable. Our country is also paying more and more attention to environmental protection, and the weather condition in Beijing this past winter was very good, which shows me that as long as we take environmental management as an important issue to solve, we will surely come up with a solution.
Topic 6: The Myth of Character - Who You Really Are
Recognizing yourself is not an easy task. Although we spend a lot of time with ourselves, few of us really know ourselves. How does this presentation look at "who you are"?
The speaker is a personality psychologist. He categorizes people along five dimensions:
1. open vs. closed
2. aware vs. unenthusiastic
3. extroverted vs. introverted
4. agreeable vs. disagreeable
5. neurotic vs. emotionally stable
The most familiar of the two are the extroverted and the introverted. Extroverts often need stimulation from both inside and outside, and will enjoy drinking coffee and going to lively places. Introverts, on the other hand, like to stay in quiet places and drink coffee in the afternoon and can't sleep at night. It's not that introverts don't like to socialize, it's just that they realize they can perform better when there's less stimulation.
On the one hand the speaker categorizes people, on the other hand he believes that everyone is unique and cannot be simply categorized. Everyone values things differently and it is these differences that make you unique.
"Who are you?" , this is a philosophical question, although this question is not easy to answer, but it is worth thinking about seriously. A lot of suffering is caused by a lack of understanding of yourself. For example, choosing jobs and people that don't fit. If you know more about yourself, it is easier to make the right choice.
Topic 7: Fearlessness, Learning without End
The speaker grew up as a very confident boy who thought he was the Hulk until he was seven years old when he attended a summer camp and was dragged by a partner in the water. Though he was eventually rescued by one of the teachers, his fear of water has always haunted him. How did he overcome his fear?
A friend who needed six cups of coffee every day told the speaker that he would go without coffee for a year if the speaker could swim one kilometer in open water. The speaker accepted the challenge. He tried all sorts of things to do this: getting triathletes to train themselves; using kickboards; taking championship swimming lessons. But none of these worked. Until one day he heard a friend suggest that he try Terry Laughlin's "total immersion" swimming method.
This method took the speaker to a whole new way of swimming, through which he learned to swim and managed to complete a kilometer. It made him realize that the best results are slowed down by misconceptions and untested assumptions.
The speaker realized from his approach to language learning that the material is more important than the method. The speaker was intimidated by learning a foreign language for some time. A study experience in Japan changed his perspective on language. Studying in Japan made him realize that he had to learn Japanese well. He searched for different books and CDs, but nothing helped until he found a list of 1945 common kanji characters that had been prescribed by the Japanese Ministry of Education in 1981.
He studied this material intensely, and after six months, he could read newspapers, and his Japanese went from first to fourth grade. In six months, he was able to read the newspaper, and his Japanese went from level one to level four. He learned twelve languages this way. He realized: being effective is more important than being efficient. The latter focuses on doing well, but not on doing the right thing.
He even concluded that you can understand the grammatical structure of a language by translating the following six sentences into past, present, and future tense for native speakers.
1. The apple is red.
2. It is John's apple.
3. I give John the apple.
4. We want to give him the apple.
5. He give it to John.
6. She gives it to him.
In addition the speaker was previously afraid of ballroom dancing. He was encouraged to sign up for a month-long course at a dance class in Argentina after he had only wanted to watch. To motivate himself to learn, he utilized Parkinson's law (the complexity of a task is related to the amount of time you give it). He signed himself up for a competition, which was only four months away.
In that time, he first hired a female coach to teach his female partner the steps. Then he researched the abilities and characteristics of different race winners and interviewed these people. He noticed that in addition to the epiphenomenal things these people mentioned (which they recommended practicing), there were also some endophenomenal things (the ****ty things they didn't say, but which could be detected through observation).
He summarized these internal and external things, and he found that these champions had three ****s in common:
1. long steps
2. different types of pivots
3. Variation in tempo
He broke down the process of the dance through videography
By practicing these internal and external manifestations, he set a world record after five months and two weeks.
If you just listen to his accomplishments, it would feel like this is a very powerful person, and listen to him talk down the learning process, and you'll feel like it's all natural. With the right learning methods, along with constant practice and persistence, success is inevitable.
Topic 8: The Gospel of Doubt
December 31, 1999, was predicted to be the end of the world, and that God would come to earth a second time. On this day, the speaker and others were in a church, waiting for God to come and deliver them. When the clock strikes twelve, however, people realize that what was predicted has not happened.
The twelve-year-old speaker, like the others, feels cheated like never before. When the speaker returned home with mixed feelings and saw people in different places millennium blessing, he suddenly realized that the time is different in different regions, is the Lord going to come down to earth once and for all? This is even more absurd to the speaker.
This incident made the speaker realize: doubt is possible. The answer is wrong probably the question itself is wrong. From that moment on, under the mountain of certainty, a spring of doubt began to flow. The speaker began to search for something to believe in.
At first he thought that a good education would save him, and leaving the slums at 18 to go to Cambridge to study made him think that he could leave all his misfortunes behind him, but when he found himself pinned to the ground with a gun to his head by a burglar with his double upper behind him, he realized that the best education could not save him.
When he became an intern at Lehman Brothers in 2008, he thought he was far from poverty, yet as he watched the financial edifice collapse, he realized that the best job wouldn't save him.
When he entered Washington as a young journalist, he heard "America will change", but then Congress shut down and the country fell apart. He realizes that the nascent politics won't save him.
Although his beliefs in the "gods of success, money, and power" died after midnight, just as they did at age 12, the speaker did not give up looking for a new god. He believes he can either keep searching or die.
He found Harvard Business School, and on an 8,000-mile road trip in 2013, the speaker met different people, worked with some of them, and was inspired by the experience to start a nonprofit organization. This organization has become an influential organization because of the author's efforts, people's search for meaning, and countless entrepreneurs.
The researcher credits himself with convincing people that we can cure society's problems. But in the process, the speaker was given another gospel. At a Harvard Business School alumni meeting a year ago, hundreds of people gave $500 billion. And two days later, the speaker was on an urban farm, listening to the story of a man named Tony. Some kids would attend one of his programs just to eat just one meal a day. It was a program that Tony ran on his pension, a program in which he was not paid. Despite the success of the program, he lacks resources and he needs help.
These two contrast and make the speaker realize that he is not a savior and that he needs to think about those who want to stand on their own two feet. He closes his organization and shares his organizational model for free to those who think they are capable of doing well. This frees the speaker from the messianic pressure of realizing that time is limited, the gap is too wide, and miracles don't happen. He needs to mobilize everyone.
This speech is very deep and not well understood, especially the latter part. I think it's great that he's sharing a good model for free, and that Chinese charities can do it in this way, which I think will relieve the pressure on individuals and give dignity to the people who are being rescued.
Topic 9: Giving back to the earth with our last warmth
Death is unavoidable for anyone, what should be done with the body after death? We know that different places have different customs, there are earth burial, tree burial, water burial, cremation and so on. Different customs, but also reflects the different understanding of death. Like the Egyptian body made mummies, because they believe that the soul will not disappear after death, even if the world has died, as long as the body is well preserved, can still be resurrected in the netherworld.
What answer will the speaker bring to the question of what to do with the remains?
The speaker was born into a medical family, so she wasn't shy about talking about death at the dinner table, but she didn't choose medicine. She chose to study design in architecture school. But during her studies, she became interested in what to do with her remains.
Through her knowledge, traditional disposal wastes a lot of resources and there are not enough cemeteries in the US anymore. Cremation is favored because it is simple, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly. But when you think about it, we use fire to turn remains into ash, a process that produces carbon dioxide and causes damage to nature.
The speaker wonders: why would we choose such a way of harming the earth for our final departure?
A phone call from a friend inspired her. She thought, "If animals can be composted after they die, why not people?" By working with many experts in the field and doing some experiments, she gave us this scenario: in a funeral parlor, we have a funeral ceremony, then the remains of the deceased are transported to the main facility, where the remains are covered with wood shavings, and after a few weeks of microbial decomposition, the remains are turned into a fertilizer, which we can use to grow a tree, under which we can later pay tribute to the deceased.
This is a really good idea. People come from nature, and eventually let people return to nature, while the living go through the tree to honor the dead. It reminds me of a quote I once read: a seed becomes a tree, does the seed die? It doesn't, it just transforms into a form of existence. If the remains are dealt with in this way, even if a loved one leaves us, seeing the tree, we will feel that he is still with us.
Topic 10: Prison or College for Kids
This is a speech that reflects the state of justice in America. I've heard reports about the conflicts between African American youth and the police, but I didn't realize that these reports reflected the serious problems of the American justice system. This may be a way of telling us not to ignore the visible signs, which may just be the tip of the iceberg, and there are huge problems hidden underneath.
The speaker was studying at the University of Pennsylvania, and near the university is a long-established African-American community, and a different group of people, who are living a different kind of life trajectory: they face probation officers rather than teachers; go to court rather than classes; go to a correctional facility rather than traveling; and, in their 20s, get not a degree, but a criminal record.
Over the past four decades, the rate of prison sentences served in the United States has increased by 700 percent. For every 100,000 people, 716 serve time. The speaker was teaching a class in college to a sophomore girl and met one of her 15 year old brothers who had just returned from juvenile hall, and since then she has invested her time in researching the state of justice in the United States.
After her sophomore year, she moved into that African-American neighborhood and spent six years trying to understand what local young people had to deal with growing up. In the first week she saw how often police games were played among kids. In the time that followed, she saw how the police searched people, entered houses, assaulted people, brought them in for questioning, and chased them down the street.
What struck her was how an 18-year-old boy was on his way to jail for a schoolyard brawl, and in one incident his 11-year-old brother was also sentenced to three years of corrections. If he had gone to the high school the speaker attended, his incident would have only been recognized as a school brawl, which would have been resolved within the school and would not have risen to the level of a crime.
The polarization of American society is something I've heard about before, but not in detail, and after watching this film, I understand more. It can be seen that people living in different classes in this society face different justice.
One of the things the speaker said that was quite shocking was something to the effect that we are asking kids who live in neighborhoods where violence happens every day, who have the fewest family resources, who go to the worst schools, and who face the toughest labor markets, to not make the slightest mistake on the way to growing up.
There are all sorts of problems in a country, and it's not practical to solve them all at once, but the order of problem solving is something to think about, and in my opinion, the problems that matter to the next generation should always be prioritized.
Topic 11: Dreams we haven't dared to dream
What dreams have we not dared to dream? Let's hear what the speakers have to say.
At the age of 8, the speaker saw a picture of Armstrong on the moon. Before that, and after that, the speaker never saw such an image again.
At eighteen, when the speaker realizes that he is gay, he feels the strangeness from this country. After people fought against the dangers, eventually gay marriage was recognized by Congress. At the age of eighteen, he couldn't believe he could start a gay family.
This is a big step forward, but at the same time, the speaker sees a huge divide in many ways: in marriage, in the gay community, in the AIDS community. If we don't bridge the abyss between people, what do we gain by putting a man on the moon?
Radicalization and overwork have prevented people from maintaining inner peace and living in the present. The development of communication technology has not led to an increase in listening skills. Easy access to information has not led to increased joy. What we need is to create a society where we can be honest and caring.
We can dream boldly of rapid technological advances, but we dare not dream of advancing humanity. The speaker argued that we should be curious about human nature, learn to get along with others, and dare to create a world where we no longer ask others what they do, but what their dreams are.
Listening to the speech recently made me see that the lack of understanding between people in this country, the United States, has reached a very serious point, and some people recognize this problem. I don't have such a strong feeling in our country, and in the traditional Chinese culture, there is more attention to human nature, and people pay attention to other people's feelings, which is different from the West's over-emphasis on individualism. Recently, I have started to study Zhouyi, and I feel that this ancient wisdom can still shine in the new era.
Topic 12: The Boxer in the Workplace
When you see this topic, you may wonder what a boxer in the workplace is. Let's see how the speaker explains it.
The speaker first creates a situation: facing a graduate from a 985 university with excellent grades and a perfect resume, and a graduate from an average university with a lot of job-hopping experience, and some strange work experiences, such as singing in bars and working in restaurants. If both are capable of fulfilling the requirements of the position, who would you choose?
The former is called the "silver spoon" by the speaker, they have the absolute advantage and are destined for success. The latter, called "boxers", have had to overcome enormous obstacles to reach their success, and their experience sounds like a quilt that has been stitched together.
The latter's disjointed work history may suggest a lack of focus and concentration. But it might also suggest that they are constantly battling frustration. So we should give these people an interview.
In contrast to the latter, the former also made efforts and sacrifices on their way to academic success. But their academic success may also cause them to not be able to face the difficulties at work well. And they have a differentiated view of what they are doing, and some of the work is not worth doing in their eyes.
The speakers themselves are from a family whose father suffers from "paranoid" schizophrenia, and whose lives are a combination of "asylum, awakening, and beautiful mind. She is the fourth oldest in the family, and lives in a home without a house, a car, or a washing machine of her own. But this didn't break her, and she was strongly motivated to understand the relationship between business success and "boxers".
She met successful business people, read a lot of profiles of leaders with a lot of power, and she found some **** that many of these people had suffered great setbacks in their early years: poverty, abandonment, early death of parents, etc.
She also studied the relationship between business success and "boxers".
Research also shows that people grow themselves after experiencing trauma. In one study, 1/3 of children who experienced trauma ended up leading healthy, successful lives. This was the case with Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple. He was adopted, didn't graduate from college, went to India for a year, and had dyslexia, but they didn't stop him from succeeding.
"Boxers" face the frustration of life, they believe that fate is in their own hands, the result is not good will think how I can do to bring good results, they will not give up on themselves. When they overcame the various difficulties they encountered, the difficulties they encountered in the future, there is no longer any difficulty for them. Just as a person who has been able to solve a problem that seemed extremely difficult at the time, and who has challenged himself successfully, it will be easier for him to accept a problem that is higher than his own ability in the future.
In addition to this, it is essential to have the help of others who can bring out the best in you and advise you on how to succeed.
I've heard this before from speakers. The "silver spoon" that the speaker referred to is the kind of person that we are committed to nurturing in our education, but we are also aware that not everyone can be this kind of person, and in order to nurture this kind of person, some families will clear all the obstacles in their children's path, which is actually unnecessary, and the obstacles are good for the children's growth, and they can develop their resilience. Some people deliberately set up barriers, I think it is necessary to carefully consider, you set up barriers appropriate, that is to cultivate his resilience, if not appropriate, it may blow away his confidence to overcome difficulties, so that he will always have a sense of powerlessness in the face of difficulties in the future. When you do not know how to do must be right, choose to do nothing is the best.